Raspberry fields forever!

Earning their 5-year pins

Two days before officially moving out from the DC area last fall, Bea went to spend half a day finishing up earning her final Master Gardener volunteer hours at a local public garden.  She does things like this just to check things off her to-do-lists.  This morning of volunteer work gave her enough hours to earn her 5-year pin at the annual Christmas party, which of course meant driving back up to DC and a midnight drive home, but Bea was happy so it was worth it!  Plus that party always features LOTS of delicious free food.  Definitely worth it.

Well, hello there, leftover raspberries!

Anyway, the other result of this morning of volunteer work was that Bea earned us 100+ free raspberry plants!  (Who knew that we needed so many?!)  Apparently, the volunteer task that day was thinning out existing plants, and after filling in gaps they still ended up with a wheelbarrow full of unneeded plants that were bound for the compost until Bea stepped in to save them.

Unfortunately, what with the move and all, the poor plants ended up sitting around for a month before we had a chance to do anything with them.  Then right before we left on our Christmas adVANture, we had a week of unseasonably beautiful weather and Bea decided it was time we dug 150' of trenches, build a dozen raspberry trellises, and got these plants in the ground -- all in less than 3 days!

Bea did some online research and designed our trellises based on a sort of average between various pieces of dissenting advice available from blogs and extension services up and down the east coast.  We documented our process and we'll follow up next year with an update on how they actually serve once our plants (hopefully!) grow.

How to Build Raspberry Trellises

Measure once...

Measure twice!

Step 1: Figure out how many trellises you'll need & stake out your area.

We decided to plant three 50' rows of raspberries and space the trellises 16' 8" apart [50'/3] based on reading recommended trellis spacing of anywhere from 12-25' apart within rows.  16'8" seemed like a good average.  So, we'd need a total of a dozen trellises.



We wanted them to line up with our future hoophouse (also 50' long) and also with a driveway that runs alongside our field so that they'll look neat when the Googlemaps satellite snaps its next photo!  So we spent quite a bit of time with 100' tape measures, string, squares, calculators, and rebar scrap stakes making sure everything was lined up before ever starting the building portion of this project.  We spaced our rows 7' apart so we can still get a lawn mower between them and so the canes don't create a complete thicket in the summer!

Step 2: Acquire lumber.

While cedar or another hardwood would be an optimal choice for trellises, we are still on a restricted budget so we went with treated lumber.  Since lumber is treated with chemicals (sometimes including arsenic, although this article indicated that's no longer accepted practice), it's not generally recommended for edible garden applications like raised beds -- but we are burying these posts into a very wet soil and so in our case untreated wood just wouldn't last.  So for each PAIR of trellises, we bought:

• (2) 4x4x8'
• (1) 2x4x8'

Our compost arrives!

You'll also need to buy some concrete -- we used (3) 60# bags for installing our 12 trellises.  [Note: don't forget to double-check your math before hauling home 3x as much concrete as you actually need -- unloading it -- not needing it -- loading it back up -- and then back to the store.  While it's returnable if it didn't get wet, this makes for more of a workout than most people care to pursue!]

You'll also need a load of compost for amending the soil while you plant your raspberries.  We ordered a dumptruck-full because we'll need it for our garden and future hoophouse as well.

Step 3: Mark your cuts and notches.

We decided to use a half-lap joint to connect the 2x4 cross-pieces to the 4x4 upright.  Basically this means cutting a notch in the 4x4 that's the correct size to accept the 2x4 and sit flush.  This will keep any rainwater from sitting directly on the joint & it looks nice too.

Mark out the notches

For the cross-pieces, we cut to 18" and 30" so that we could get 4 pieces out of each 8' 2x4.  We decided to position them 42" and 66" when measuring up from the bottom of the 4x4, with the wider crosspiece sitting above the smaller one.  The wires extending from the shorter crosspiece should catch the new/early growth on the raspberry plants while the taller crosspieces will catch the canes when they're fully grown and producing berries.  If these measurements seem tall, don't forget that the posts are going to be buried 18" in the ground so the final height of these crosspieces will be 2' and 4' above the ground.  [Side note: if you wanted to conserve lumber, you could use 12' 4x4s cut in half and not have any extra post sticking up above the upper crosspiece.  We thought it could be useful to have the extra in case we have to install bird netting in future so we stuck with 8' posts.]

To mark your cuts, just use a speed square to make straight lines and trace the lip of it around the corner on the post so your lines show at least 2 sides of the lap cut.  You can trace out the 3rd side too if you want but it's not necessary.

Step 4: Cut up the crosspieces.

Centering the placement of crosspieces

A circular saw is easiest for this.  Once you have a pile of short pieces, one person can go about measuring the center on each of these and marking out where the pieces should overlap in order to be centered.  If cut accurately, the marks on the shorter piece will be at 7 1/4" and 10 3/4", and for the longer pieces 13 1/4" and 16 3/4".  (Basically you're taking the center marks of 9" and 15" and adding/subtracting half the width of the 4x4 [3.5"/2 = 1.75"].  You could also just eyeball this but we're kind of OCD!)

Step 5: Notch your posts.

 You'll need a reciprocating saw (sawzall) with a somewhat flexible wood blade.  It's easier to use a circular saw for the straight cuts but a sawzall will do that too if you have a steady hand.  First, cut along the two sides.

Then, come back with your sawzall to cut a gentle diagonal curve from one corner down to the bottom of the lap and across.  Then take your sawzall back across the bottom of the lines to complete the lap.  Keep a test 2x4 handy to make sure they fit & make additional adjustment cuts as needed.  The goal is to have the cross-pieces sit square and as snugly as possible so rain doesn't get into the joint.

Square!

Step 6: Screw everything together.

Make sure to use galvanized screws which are rated for outdoor use!  We attached 3 to each joint in a triangle pattern for strength.

One completed trellis.  11 more to go!

Step 7: Prepare your trenches & post-holes.

“I love post-holing!"

18" down is a long way in clay soil!

So while one person was making all those notch cuts, the other person can be digging & amending trenches, plus digging post holes.  In our case, Bea really likes digging post holes for some reason, so she dug down 18" with a post-hole-digger.  (Check your local building codes for the depth of your frost-line.)  We used quite a lot of string and rebar scraps to stake everything out and make sure these holes were in line -- the “measure twice, cut once!" rule applies to digging too!

1st trench complete

Spreading out the compost

We removed sod and dug trenches 1' wide and 1' deep with a spading fork & shovel, then shoveled in 4" of finished compost, raked the soil we had removed back on top, mixed it up with the compost, and then raked everything flat.  It's going to be a lot easier to prepare the ground at the same time as you're installing your trellises so suck it up and prepare for a good few days of hard work!

Raking soil back on top

Compost adds nutrients to our mostly-clay soil

Step 8: Install the trellises!

Our groundwater is apparently very high and so our holes started filling with water.  We found small rocks and put one or two down in each hole just so the bottom of the post wouldn't be sitting straight in water.  Putting a rock in the bottom of post-holes isn't a bad idea in any case.


So once you're ready, drop your trellis down into the post-hole and have one person check that it's plumb.  A post-level is a great tool to make this easy as you can check 2 directions at one time.  Make sure it's straight in line with the others in its row, and if you're a perfectionist, you can ensure that it's in line with the other rows too.

While one person holds the post in position, the other can pour concrete down into the hole all around the post.  We chose to dry-pack the concrete which means taking advantage of groundwater or impending rain to set the cement for you rather than mixing it up beforehand.  Dry-packing is a lot less messy and certainly quicker, as long as you don't live in a desert or somewhere really dry.  We tamped the concrete down around the post with a garden trowel and made sure to fill the hole all the way up level with the surrounding soil.

If your trellises are wobbly at all you may wish to stake them so they don't move during the concrete-curing process, but ours seemed sturdy so we just left them as-is.  After a couple of days they were solid.

Step 9: Plant your raspberries!

Soak in water before planting

Space 2'-3' apart

If you're careful not to bump into your trellises, you can put the plants in the ground the same day as you install your trellises.  If you're clumsy, you can wait until the trellises' concrete bases are cured and come back to plant then.  Red raspberries need spacing 2' within rows and black raspberries need to be 3' apart.  Soak your plants in a bucket of water before planting and water thoroughly as soon as they're planted if rain isn't imminent.  Mulch heavily with leaves for the winter.

Patience...

Step 10: Attach guide wires

Hardware for the catchwires

Sometime before our plants start growing in spring, we'll attach guide wires to the end of each crosspiece.  We bought a spool of galvanized electric fence wire which will run from one end to the other (4 runs per row -- one on each crosspiece end). We'll run the wire through weatherproof eyehooks attached to the end of each crosspiece, and each end will also have a turnbuckle on it so we'll be able to get the wire pretty tight.  We'll update this with a picture once this part of the assemblage is installed!

In the end...

The two of us were able to finish this project by working (3) 6-hour days, installing approximately one 50' row of raspberries per day.  You don't strictly need ~100 raspberry plants for a family of 2.  Bea has ideas that she will be able to load up our freezer and also make a lot of jam and friends with these berries.  We'll update with a raspberries post next summer with how it actually works out for us!

Our completed raspberry field!

Homemade Goddess Dressing!

As a followup to our last post about Budget Lockdown, when we were grocery shopping I was astounded at the high price of certain natural foods in a regular grocery store.  We've been a bit spoiled living within walking distance of Glut Co-op, whose motto is “Still cheap, still funky!"  They have a great selection of bulk grains, spices, teas, etc where you can bring your own containers and fill them up with just the amount that you need, and the prices there really can't be beat.  Hopefully we'll be able to find a similar store in the Charlottesville area, although the only commercial establishment within walking distance of home is a gas station that sells just your basic dairy & dry goods.  (That is, until we open the general store, but that'll be another year or two, if it ever happens!)

Anyway, our go-to lunch these days is a super simple wrap containing vegetarian deli meat, salad greens, & Annie's Goddess dressing.  The dressing is a pretty critical ingredient in making this easy & tasty meal, but at the conventional grocery store, the price listed on this particular dressing was $4.50 for an 8 ounce jar, more than triple what we're used to -- that's crazy talk!  When you only have $100 for your entire monthly grocery budget for 2 people, that's just an impossibility.

So I remembered a few years ago when a couple friends had a Goddess-dressing “cookoff" -- trying to see who could come up with the closest concoction mimicking the store-brand.  I decided to give this a go myself, and here's what I came up with.

Homemade “Goddess" Dressing

You'll need:

• 2 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 3 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
• 3 Tbsp soy sauce
• 3 Tbsp lemon juice
• 2 Tbsp minced garlic
• 1/4 cup warm water
• 1/2 cup tahini
• salt & pepper to taste
• pinch of paprika

Directions:

1. Combine everything in a food processor.
2. Push the button.
3. Hey presto!

Well, this gets you pretty close, anyway.  Taste it and add more of any of these ingredients if it doesn't taste quite right to you.  The ingredients list on the original Annie's bottle didn't include paprika but did include parsley, so feel free to adapt and use your own discretion with whatever tastes good to you!

When you're done tweaking the dressing, just funnel it into an empty & clean jar/bottle, and store in the fridge.  It will thicken so you may wish to store it upside-down if the jar's not quite full.

Also a quick side note, Chris HATES it when I reuse old bottles/jars without soaking off the labels so he can't tell what's in them.  A typical conversation:

     Bea: Could you get the peach syrup I made last fall?
     Chris: Where is it?
     Bea: In the fridge.
     Chris (sarcastically): No kidding!  I don't see it.
     Bea: Oh yeh!  It's in a jar labeled “Rosemary Garlic Cider Jelly."  But I drew a line through that.  That might've rubbed off though.
     Chris: ARRRRRRRRGH!!!

So my favorite part of this project was pouring my creation back in the empty Annie's bottle and we'll see if Chris notices the subtle difference in flavor (or labeling!)  ;-)

Time vs. Money, and Our “Budget Lockdown" Challenge

Boy, do I love budgets!

Since getting married, Chris & I have set aside an hour or two at the end of every month to go over our budgets and spending.  We have a really boring name for this, our Monthly Budget Reconciliation Meetings, and it's like Chris's worst nightmare.  As someone who's back-burner-dreamed of becoming an accountant/book-keeper, these meetings are about 5,000 times more exciting for me than for poor Chris!  Still, since all the time we've known each other (2007), there's only been 8 months that we've overlapped and BOTH had full-time paid employment, so this balancing act of supporting each other has become pretty much routine for us.

Get serious here!

In leaving the DC area, one of the motivating factors was that we hoped to live in a lower cost-of-living area where we could both have some time to pursue unpaid activities while simultaneously not going into debt.  To do this, we've instituted the dreaded Budget Lockdown!

The Budget Lockdown logic goes, we have set categories of required expenses each month and we set our categorical limits so that our minimal income covers these expenses.  Then anything that we spend outside of these preset categories comes directly out of our savings, which should motivate us to stop unbudgeted spending, excepting emergencies.  [Side note: Mint.com is an awesome free tool for managing all this -- Mint automatically syncs expenses/income from an unlimited # of accounts so you just have to categorize, don't have to do any data entry!]

Sometime back in college while working on a living wage campaign, the idea that my life is worth at least $10/hour made me think about purchases in a way that has stuck with me: is this item going to be worth exchanging x hours of my life for?

When I was getting paid my max wage of $17/hour, it was a lot easier to say “OK, I can pretty easily buy this $10 item because it only took me half an hour to earn it, that's like no time at all!"  But those small items really add up and you end up with a bunch of STUFF that you don't necessarily need or feel great about owning.  However, later down the road when you can't justify spending really any money on discretionary items like this, at least you can reuse/reinvent all the stuff you already own in order to get by!

Q:  So what happens to this equation when your wage is $0/hour?

A:  You do a whole lot more things yourself!

Coming from someone who's always tried to live from a DIY standpoint, this earning $0/hour is sort of like an adventure in challenging myself to live true to my ideals.  No alcohol budget?  Homebrew!  No entertainment budget?  Go on a walk!  Or, get movies at the library, or convert your old home movies from when you were a kid, plus then you can finally get rid of that VCR!  No restaurants budget?  Plan menus better!  No snacks budget?  Make your own!  No fast food budget?  Make food ahead & freeze it!  No clothing budget?  Mend what you got!  Limited grocery budget?  Grow your own food!  And in winter?  Build a hoophouse or eat foodstuffs you've preserved!

Root Juice!

All of these pieces of advice are things I found totally impractical to do on the scale that could actually make an economic impact for our family while also holding a full-time job, and Chris was less interested in being the one to head up any of these projects (although he's a fantastic sous chef!).  I know very few people who are able to both work full-time AND do everything at home, and once you have kids you're trying to support, priorities all change because really spending your free time playing with your kid vs darning socks is no real contest.

Chillaxin'!

So what Chris & I are doing right now is sort of like a bucket-list fantasy of mine -- something that may end up a total disaster, but that I would always regret if I died without having tried, & something that only seems possible if we get in the DIY habit before we have children: Try to live with as little an economic impact as possible.  We're not really doing this anywhere close to the scale of self-sufficiency that some people do -- we're on the electrical grid & can't currently afford solar panels.  Obamacare kicked in just in time for us, which is miraculously saving us almost $700/month from what we paid before in health insurance, & basically makes this all possible!  We buy gas for Chris to get to his job 2 days a week, and to visit family & friends, near & far.  We have some internet, and drive to the library for more when we run out or need to transfer large files.  We had a chest freezer-full of very random, mostly expired foods when we moved here, plus a fair number of root veggies from our DC garden, so we have been creatively trying to use up whatever we already have on hand rather than using a grocery store as our primary source of ingredients.  But for day-to-day decisions, we are getting good at trying to figure out if there's a way to meet our needs without spending any money.

So after 3 months of Budget Lockdown, how's it going?  

Visiting the lake

As it turns out, we're fairly good about sticking to our spending for budgeted expenses, but a bit worse about spending when it comes to unbudgeted items.

Budget Lockdown means each unbudgeted purchase becomes more than just a snap decision -- something like buying a $20-40 item becomes an evening project to pore over all the reviews of different models to be certain to make the best selection.  For example, some of our recent unbudgeted expenses include: a Brush Grubber, a carbon monoxide detector, and a woodstove thermometer.  Pretty practical stuff that will improve our lives, but stuff that we didn't know we really “needed".

I'm usually fairly impatient and if I think I need a certain product in order to accomplish a task, I'd way rather just choose one that looks decent enough and hope for the best.  In the past, our Time vs Money graph settled on my side of the fence, where it actually realistically (financially) wouldn't be worth putting that much thought/effort/time into trying to save $20, but now since most of our time isn't paid anyway, Chris is in product-ordering-heaven being able to really deliberate over each item and not having any pushback from me about what a waste of time that could be.

Cheap date

The main positive thing that Budget Lockdown has done for us is it feels like there is no such thing as wasted time anymore!  By driving a wedge between these two aspects so intertwined in the “time is money" attitude, we're now able to do a lot of the random things we have “never had time for," or at least certainly never made time for.  There's no-one but ourselves to judge what a “good use of time" is!

Another aspect of how Budget Lockdown is playing out positively is in how it's affected some of our old patterns (ruts) we got into addressing ADHD in our relationship -- particularly as it pertains to the amount of time it takes to accomplish any concrete objectives.  Before learning anything about ADHD (and sometimes even after!), the typical pattern is something like:

1. Both partners agree on some course of action to reach a mutually desired outcome & decide how soon they want to accomplish it.
2. The non-ADHD partner spends considerable time & effort breaking the ultimate goal into smaller achievable pieces, setting deadlines and a logical order in which these should be done in order to meet the overall goal in the agreed-upon timetable.
3. These smaller benchmarks/subtasks are divided up, usually with more of the “harder" or less concrete tasks taken on by the non-ADHD partner (at least, if they've learned anything about working together).
4. The non-ADHD partner focuses and achieves all assigned tasks by stated deadlines, maybe even sooner because they probably knew to build a buffer into the timeline.
5. When they check in with each other, the ADHD partner has either lost track of the tasks, hyperfocused on one minute aspect of a task, or has forgotten why they are doing any of this stuff in the first place.
6. The non-ADHD partner gently (at first) reminds the ADHD partner of the ultimate goal they had both committed to, and points out how close they are, maybe even offers to take on more of the remaining incomplete subtasks if needed.
7. ADHD partner decides they no longer need to pursue the original goal, wants to change the “totally arbitrary" order of the subtasks, or wasn't listening while the non-ADHD partner was talking so asks again why they're doing any of this stuff.
8. Non-ADHD partner gets upset and starts blaming the ADHD partner for not paying attention and not caring about their shared life together & melodramatically ranting about how they will never get anything done as a team because “nothing ever gets done if I don't just do it myself!" and “what's the point of being in a relationship if I can't count on you to do your half?"
9. ADHD partner gets defensive and blames non-ADHD partner for being so focused on deadlines and checking things off that they never get to have any fun & why are they so single-minded/controlling/nagging/boring/etc, what is their problem anyway?!?
10. Neither partner feels especially heard, understood, or loved, and therefore neither feels like compromising or working together any more, and so the shared goal remains unachieved, and the time the non-ADHD partner put into getting them 80% of the way there is just lost & unrecognized.  The ADHD partner promptly forgets this episode ever happened but the non-ADHD partner begins to hold a grudge after this scenario repeats several times over.

Hours of amusement

So now, with Budget Lockdown (aka when there's no perception of time a-wasting), I can largely let go of tasks, goals, & deadlines and it is much easier to adopt Chris's concept of time where the days blend into each other and what doesn't get done today might possibly get done next week or maybe next month, without resenting the time slipping by.  Instead of thinking like a single-minded linear robot, “It is now 2:34pm on Tuesday January 7th, we only have however many hours left to accomplish this huge list of stuff today," I can now think simply “It's Winter."

For me, someone who as a kid always dreamed of living in a tree with wolves and squirrels as my only companions and only the sun & passing seasons to tell time by, this is a lot closer to living by my actual values, not what I've been socialized to want to accomplish.  This new attitude toward time & living with a lack of to-do lists has led much more often to the sort of interactions I always hoped to have with my partner:

1. Hey baby, how's that project coming along?
2. Well, I was working on that thing we talked about doing, but then I was cold so I went out to get some wood for the fire, and when I was outside I went to go check the mail, and a friend sent us this CD, and I saw a bird fly by that dropped this feather, isn't it big?  Whoa, I love this song!  Wanna dance?



Why not?!

3. Definitely!

So far at least, our Budget Lockdown experiment is going pretty darn well!  We don't expect to be able to make it last more than a few months before we get jobs or decide to have children, but meanwhile we'll be doing our best to make the most of every day, in our own way!